Hi, my name is Father Mike Schmitz, and you're listening to the Catechism in the Year podcast,

where we encounter God's plan of sheer goodness for us, revealed in scripture, and passed down through the tradition of the Catholic faith.

The Catechism in a year is brought to you by Ascension.

In 365 days, we'll read through the Catechism of the Catholic Church discovering our identity in God's family as we journey together toward our heavenly home. This is day 239. We are reading paragraphs 1783 to 1789. As always, I am using the Ascension edition of the Catechism, which includes the Foundations of Faith approach, but you can follow along with any recent version of the Catechism of the Catholic Church. You can also download your own catechism and a year reading plan by visiting ascensionpress.com slash C-I-Y. You can also click follow or subscribe in your podcast app for daily updates and daily notifications today. It's going to be the day. I think it's the second time I made that joke. I don't even know the song. It's from the 1990s.

Day 239, and it is 1783 to 1789. It didn't even follow through on the joke. Today is going to be the day. I'm going to make it back to you. Is that like, I don't know, it's a British band. I can't remember. Anyways, day 239. Goodness gracious, We're talking about conscience. We've been talking about conscience for a little bit now, and we're going to continue to talk about the formation of conscience. And the fact that we already said this before is that we have a right to act in conscience and in freedom so as to personally make moral decisions. That's what we have. No one can force us to do something. And yet, conscience has to be formed. It can't be forced, but it has to be formed. can't be coer yet conscience has to be formed it can't be forced but it has to be

formed can't be coerced but has to be formed and so what is it informed with it's informed with not only

the intellectual formation our conscience is also formed by personal formation what i mean by that is

we all know what it is to know the right thing but to do the wrong thing right we

know what it is to have the intellectual knowledge about this but conscience remember conscience is

different it's distinct from simply intellect and distinct from simply will it's it's a whole kind of

I want to say other thing and so yes conscience is a reasoned action, so it's intellectual, but we realize

it's also action, meaning it's connected to the will. Because of that, we recognize that the

formation of conscience isn't merely intellectual formation. It's also, you say like, I don't know,

moral formation, really in so many ways because again let's go back

to this we're going to say this a couple times today it is one thing to know the right thing to do

and it is another thing to do it for our conscience to be formed well we have to be the kind of people

who are formed not only in knowing the good but also choosing the good and so we so we're going to talk about that today, as well as some other things, the fact that education of conscience is a lifelong task and some other things like this. Okay, in order to dive into today, hopefully this has been, last couple days, have been hopefully a real big blessing, but also maybe even a challenge. And maybe that's even a good

thing, right? Sometimes I keep going back, oh, I'm sorry, guys, you know, this is kind of a tough

thing. But maybe that's a good thing. Maybe it's true that it is important for us to do hard

things and to face hard truths and hard teachings and actually let the Holy Spirit, not only

console, as we said before, but also let the Holy Spirit convict. And so we're going to pray

for that grace today as we pray. Father in heaven, we give you praise and we call upon your name.

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